how can I clone repos to `/home/coder`?

[bpmct]

By default, envbuilder will clone workspaces to /workspaces/<repo-name>. However, when I configure ENVBUILDER_WORKSPACE_FOLDER to /home/coder, it clones it directly in that folder, not /home/coder/<repo-name>.

What can I do here?

[bpmct]

@johnstcn @mafredri is this possible?

[johnstcn]

I think we need to append path.Base(parsed.Path) to options.WorkspaceFolder like we do for DefaultWorkspaceFolder https://github.com/coder/envbuilder/blob/main/options/defaults.go#L21-L38

Given:

User specifies ENVBUILDER_GIT_REPO=https://host.tld/path/to/myrepo and ENVBUILDER_WORKSPACE_FOLDER=/home/myuser

When:

Envbuilder runs

Then:

Git repo located at https://host.tld.path/to/myrepo is cloned to /home/myuser/myrepo

[bpmct]

Gotcha... I think this will be a must for folks who maintain images where they wish to store projects in a single PVC with customizations (e.g. vs code settings) and repos. Unless they want to always clone to /home/repo or the TF provider can give a good folder name based on repo name

[johnstcn]

Adding to next sprint

[mafredri]

I started looking at this and I realized the feature is behaving exactly as documented: https://github.com/coder/envbuilder/blob/c16ae9fb1b24445b17439f9b5222940e26903d14/docs/using-local-files.md

Do we want to:

1. keep this behavior
2. update the docs and turn this into a breaking change
3. add a new option that changes the default workspace_s_ folder from /workspace

Thoughts @bpmct?

[bpmct]

Could we support the repo-name as a wildcard? So the default workspaces folder changes to /workspace/$REPO (unsure what is best syntax) so someone can change it to /home/$REPO? That way, it can stay hardcoded to a folder or create a folder for the repo if it doesn't exist if wildcard is used

[bpmct]

Really, though, I have no strong opinions and am down to deprecate a flag but let’s avoid any hard-breaking changes.

[mafredri]

@bpmct I think it's best to avoid introducing magic syntax if we can avoid it. The $REPO could be especially weird if run in a shell where it's evaluated into empty due to double quoting.

Perhaps we just introduce a new option called: ENVBULDER_WORKSPACES_FOLDER=/workspaces (observe "S" in workspaces, better naming suggestions welcome) and define this one as ENVBULDER_WORKSPACE_FOLDER="$ENVBULDER_WORKSPACES_FOLDER/reponame".

I would like to keep ENVBULDER_WORKSPACE_FOLDER and it's current behavior because it mimics workspaceFolder in the spec: https://containers.dev/implementors/json_reference/#image-specific

(In the spec you see /workspace as the default value, and it means the code is directly in /workspace, not a sub folder)

[bpmct]

Sounds good.